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This series aims to differentiate `religious history' from the narrow confines of church history, investigating not only the social and cultural history of religion, but also theological, political and institutional themes, while remaining sensitive to the wider historical context; it thus advances an understanding of the importance of religion for the history of modern Britain, with volumes covering all periods of British history since the Reformation.
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Demonstrates the vital role Sunday schools played in forming and sustaining faith before, during, and after the First World War for British populations both at home and abroad.
Examines the role of Christianity in British statecraft, politics, media, the armed forces and in the education and socialization of the young during the Second World War.
The book combines intellectual, cultural and social history to address a major area of encounter between Christianity and British culture: the world of leisure.
This book starts with an extraordinary event and document. The event is the trial and execution for infanticide of a puritan minister, John Barker, along with his wife's niece and their maid, in Northampton in 1637; the document, what appears to be a virtual transcript of Barker's last speech on the gallows. His downfall soon became polemical fodder in scribal publications, with Puritans circulating defences of Barker and anti-Calvinists producing a Laudian condemnation of the minister.
Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England uses Barker's crime and fate as a window on the religious world of early modern England. It is based upon an extraordinary deposit of manuscript and printed sources, all produced between 1637 and 1640 by people living in close proximityto one another and all of whom knew one another, either as friends or more often as enemies. Marshalling evidence from public polemical sources and from almost entirely private ones - a diary, private letters and a spiritual autobiography - the book is able to examine the same events and persons, and beliefs and practices, from multiple perspectives: the micro and the macro, the personal and thepolitical, and the affective and the doctrinal. Throughout, we meet a range of very different people putting various bodies of religious theory into practice, connecting the most local and particularof events and rivalries to the great issues of the day and responding, in certain cases, to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the temptations of the devil. This approach enables a whole series of generalisations to be explored: about the relation between politics and religion, devotion and polemic, puritans and their enemies, local and national affairs; between rumour, manuscript and print; and, finally, about gender hierarchy and the social roles of men and women. The result is an extraordinarily detailed and intimate portrait of the religio-political scene in an English county on the eve of civil war.
PETER LAKE is Distinguished University Professor of early modern English history at Vanderbilt. He is the author of several studies of English religion, culture and politics in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods.
ISAAC STEPHENS is Assistant Professor of History at Saginaw Valley State University and has published on early modern marriage, religion, and life-writing.
Mysticism in Early Modern England traces how mysticism featured in polemical and religious discourse in seventeenth-century England and explores how it came to be viewed as a source of sectarianism, radicalism, and, most significantly, religious enthusiasm.
This book shows that while the Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character was working-class, this did not reflect its social origins. It was never the church of the working class, the great majority of whose churchgoers went elsewhere: rather it was the church whose commitment to its emotional witness was increasingly incompatible with middle-class pretensions. Sandy Calder shows thatthe Primitive Methodist Connexion was a religious movement led by a fairly prosperous elite of middle-class preachers and lay officials appealing to a respectable working-class constituency. This reality has been obscured by the movement's self-image as a persecuted community of humble Christians, an image crafted by Hugh Bourne, and accepted by later historians, whether Methodists with a denominational agenda to promote or scholars in search of working-class radicals. Primitive Methodists exaggerated their hardships and deliberately under-played their social status and financial success. Primitive Methodism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became the victim of its own founding mythology, because the legend of a community of persecuted outcasts, concealing its actualrespectability, deterred potential recruits.
SANDY CALDER graduated with a PhD in Religious Studies from the Open University and has previously worked in the private sector.
This innovative book reveals how Enlightened writers in England, both lay and clerical, proclaimed public support for Christianity by transforming it into a civil religion, despite the famous claim of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Christians professed an uncivil faith.
Rational Dissent was a branch of Protestant religious nonconformity which emerged to prominence in England between c. 1770 and c. 1800. While small, the movement provoked fierce opposition from both Anglicans and Orthodox Dissenters.
Bringing together researchers in modern British religious, political, intellectual and social history, this volume considers the persistence of the Church's public significance, despite its falling membership.
The 1689 Toleration Act marked a profound shift in the English religious landscape. By permitting the public worship of Protestant Dissenters (largely Presbyterian), the statute laid the foundations for legal religious pluralism, albeit limited, and ensured that eighteenth-century English society would be multi-denominational.
William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1633-45), remains one of the most controversial figures in British ecclesiastical and political history. His rise to prominence under Charles I, his contribution to the shaping and implementation of contentious religious policies and his subsequent and catastrophic downfall are fundamental to our understanding of the religious and political developments which led to the collapse of royal authority in all three of the Stuart kingdoms. Events in Scotland were central to this chain of events, and this book presents Scotland as a case study for a fresh interpretation of Laud, his career and his working partnership with Charles I. Casting new and much-needed light on Laud's engagement in Scottish affairs, this book reveals that his agency in Scotland was broadly consistent with - although differing in detail from - his approach in England and Ireland. It represents a major contribution to key debates on the nature of religion and politics in the 1630s and early 1640s and enhances current thinking on the role of both prince and prelate in the formulation of ecclesiastical policy, the 'British problem', and, indeed, the causes of the British Civil Wars. LEONIE JAMES is Lecturer in History at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
The consequences of the Reformation and the church/state polity it created have always been an area of important scholarly debate. The essays in this volume, by many of the leading scholars of the period, revisit many of the important issues during the period from the Henrician Reformation to the Glorious Revolution: theology, political structures, the relationship of theology and secular ideologies, and the Civil War. Topics include Puritan networks and nomenclature in England and in the New World; examinations of the changing theology of the Church in the century after the Reformation; the evolving relationship of art and protestantism; the providentialist thinking of Charles I; the operation of the penal laws against Catholics; and protestantism in the localities of Yorkshire and Norwich.
KENNETH FINCHAM is Reader in History at the University of Kent; Professor PETER LAKE teaches in the Department of History at Princeton University.
Contributors: THOMAS COGSWELL, RICHARD CUST, PATRICK COLLINSON, THOMAS FREEMAN, PETER LAKE, SUSAN HARDMAN MOORE, DIARMAID MACCULLOCH, ANTHONY MILTON, PAUL SEAVER, WILLIAM SHEILS
This study of recruitment to the ministry of the Church of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries overturns many long-standing assumptions about the education and backgrounds of the clergy in late Hanoverian England and Wales. It offers insights into the nature and development of the profession generally and into the role that individual bishops played in shaping the staffing of their dioceses. In its exploration of how it was possible for boys of relatively humble social origins to be promoted into the pulpits of the established Church, it throws light on mechanisms of social mobility and shows how aspirant clergy went about fashioning a credible social and professional identity.By examining how would be clergymen were educated and professionally formed, the book shows that, alongside the well-known route through the universities, there was an alternative route via specialist grammar schools. Prospective ordinands might also seek out clerical tutors to help them to study for the academic parts of ordination exams and to prepare for the spiritual and pastoral aspects of their role. These alternative methods of ordination preparation were sometimes under the cognizance of bishops, and occasionally under their control, but they were generally authored by parish clergy and were small-scale, self-supporting, bottom-up solutions to the needs of upcoming generations of clergy. This book has much to interest historians of religion, culture, class and education, and illustrates how in-depth prosopographical study can offer fresh perspectives.SARA SLINN is Research Fellow at the School of History & Heritage, University of Lincoln.
This is the first full length examination of a defining moment in the history of the Church of England in the twentieth century: the Prayer Book controversy of 1927-28. It argues that conceptions of national religion were influential in the debates surrounding liturgical revision, showing in particular how ideas of Protestant national identity clashed with both liberal Anglican and moderate Anglo-Catholic conceptions of Church and nation. It shows how the Church of England retained a significant position in national life in the interwar period; however, it also argues that the resilience of the anti-Catholic mindset amongst many Anglicans and Free Churchmen meant that the exact nature of the relationship between religion and nation was hotly contested.
This study sets the Prayer Book controversy in the context of early twentieth century British religious history, providing important insights into the history of Anglicanism, Nonconformity and ideas of English and British identity during the period.
JOHN G. MAIDEN is a Research Assistant at the Department of Religious Studies, The Open University.
The conduct of divine service was only one item on the agenda of the nineteenth-century clergyman. He might have to sit on the magistrates' bench, or concern himself with business as a farmer or landowner, or attend a meeting of the Poor Law guardians. He would, in all probability, be closely involved with the day-to-day running of the local school, and he would almost certainly be the principle administrator of the parochial charities. While some of these roles were clearly predestined to bring him into conflict with certain members of his flock, others seem ostensibly designed to operate in their interests. None, however, seem to have earned him much in the way of devotion and respect: instead, each of them at one time or another attracted the direct hostility of parishioners, most particularly those attached to dissenting and/or radical groups. This book is a detailed exploration of the relationship between Anglican clergymen and the inhabitants of rural parishes in the nineteenth century. Taking Norfolk as a focus, the author examines the many and profound ways in which the Victorian Church affected the daily lives and political destinies of local communities.
